In a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) with autonomous architecture, a wireless Access Point (AP), which is completely deployed with and interfaced to WLAN functions, is a standalone entity in the network and should be managed independently. At present, WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) based WLANs all employ the autonomous architecture. However, with the increasing scale of the WLAN deployment, because of its following inherent drawbacks, the operation mode of the network with this autonomous architecture is becoming an obstacle restricting the development of wireless techniques.
Firstly, in the WLAN with the autonomous architecture, AP, as an Internet Protocol (IP) addressable device, should be managed independently, including monitoring, configuring, controlling or the like. In large-scale network deployment, a large number of APs will bring huge management cost, and lead to heavy burden on the network. Such phenomena are more significant especially when the APs in the network are differently configured and managed, which will definitely obstruct the development of wireless techniques.
Secondly, in the WLAN with autonomous architecture, it is difficult to ensure the consistency of all configuration parameters of the AP, because among the configuration parameters of the AP, besides static parameters, most are parameters to be dynamically configured. In a large-scale WLAN, updating the dynamic configurations of APs in the whole network in time is an extremely heavy burden or is even impossible to be accomplished.
Thirdly, wireless transmission media in the WLAN are shared resources, and to improve the performance of the network, each of the APs has to be monitored in real time and the configuration of the AP has be dynamically updated based on the usage of the shared media. However, manually configuring the AP parameters related to the wireless transmission media is labor consuming and costly.
Fourthly, in the WLAN with autonomous architecture, secured access to the network and block of unauthorized APs are relatively difficult. In most cases the AP is hard to be protected due to its deployment position, and once the AP is stolen, loaded security information will be leaked out and thus the network security will be threatened by an attacker via the security information.
In a word, in the WLAN with autonomous architecture, and particularly in large-scale deployment, monitoring, configuring and controlling of the APs will lead to heavy management burden on the network. Moreover, it is hard to maintain the consistency of the AP configuration. Furthermore, the co-operation of the APs in the network required for best network performance and minimum wireless interference due to the sharing and dynamic characteristics of the wireless transmission media imposes higher demand on the configuration management of the APs. Security is one of the key factors to be considered in designing a wireless network, and in the large-scale deployment, the security of the WLAN will encounter huge challenge. Thus, it is urgent to design a WAPI-based convergent WLAN network architecture, i.e. fit AP architecture of WAPI, since the operation mode of the WLAN with autonomous architecture can not meet the requirements of the large-scale network deployment.